Jayyusi1993b

Jayyusi1993b
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Jayyusi1993b
Author(s)	Lena Jayyusi
Title	The reflexive nexus: Photo-practice and natural history
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, Ethnomethodology, Photography, Media
Publisher
Year	1993
Language
City
Month
Journal	Continuum
Volume	6
Number	2
Pages	25–52
URL	Link
DOI	10.1080/10304319309359397
ISBN
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Institution
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Howpublished
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Abstract

Specifically, I wish to argue that:

1) What is missed in much inquiry, is the embeddedness of photo-practice in an array of other mundane practices, the specific character of which needs to be elaborated in order to make sense of the photograph as an object and as a course of production. 5

2) The construal of a culture/nature dichotomy is misplaced: there is a whole order of intelligibility that is, for members, from within the course of their ongoing mundane activities (from within the natural attitude)6 naturally given. "Nature" and the "natural" are, in this sense, socially produced, yet phenomenologically distinct from that order of intelligibility which we may endogenously treat as cultural.7 The organisation, properties and logic of the "natural attitude", of what is "naturally given", perceived etc., and significantly, therefore, the socio-logic of the practical intersection (or mutual embeddedness) of nature/culture (and correspondingly that which may situatedly be treated as 'given' or as contestable) within the endogenous organisation of mundane activities and practices becomes an important set of issues to address analytically. Cultural studies analyses of the way certain kinds of "understandings" and "meanings" become "naturalised" whilst important, do not go far enough, and at times obscure, indeed fail to note, the deeply ramifying and implicative character and practical relevance of the "natural attitude" of everyday life.

3) The above points bring me to another problem in most accounts and that is the insistence on the unconstrainedly polysemic character of the photo-image, the plurality of meanings available within it (Barthes most importantly) - a significant thematic of post-structural and postmodern approaches. This connects strongly to the issue of the relationship between language and image that has been central to the semiotic literature, and I would argue, largely misconstrued in it.

What I would like to do in this paper, then, is to present an analysis of some photographs as a way of demonstrating an alternative approach to these issues, and suggesting some resolution to the dichotomies that are often set up. Specifically, what follows is an ethnomethodologically inspired analysis8 of photo-practice and the photographic object with a focus on documentary news photography.

Notes